Demonstrators remained camped near central Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square and on streets leading to the government’s headquarters on Saturday following Friday’s million-strong opposition protest, led by the Hezbollah national resistance movement.
Protesters have not been deterred by the US condemnation of Friday’s massive show of force in the Lebanese capital aimed at pressing the Western-backed government to resign.
Lebanese Army troops and armoured vehicles were heavily deployed in the capital as hordes of demonstrators packed the streets and surrounded the barricaded offices of Prime Minister Fuad Siniora.
Siniora, who heads a government backed by an anti-Syrian parliament majority elected in 2005, on Thursday vowed not to cave in to pressure from the opposition, which comprises various factions including Shi’ites and Christians.
As well as the Shi’ite Hezbollah and Aoun’s Christian faction, the opposition includes the Shi’ite Amal party of parliament speaker Nabih Berri and supporters of the Syrian-backed president.
In a capital that has seen previous protests involving hundreds of thousands of pro- and anti-Syrian demonstrators, Hezbollah called for ‘all Lebanese’ to take part in the protest, to be followed by an open-ended sit-in.
‘Out, out Siniora!’ protesters shouted as the streets filled with people waving Lebanese flags and chanting patriotic slogans.
‘We have had enough ordeals and tears,’ they chanted. ‘Siniora, out! We want a free government. We want a government that will feed our hunger.’
Hezbollah-run Al-Manar television and the Christian LBCI television both estimated that hundreds of thousands of people had joined the demonstration by 1300 GMT.
Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun addressed the crowd from a podium encased in bullet-proof glass.
Siniora has ‘made many mistakes’ and his government has ‘made corruption a daily affair,’ said Aoun, a former prime minister.
He called on the people to ‘continue the sit-in, but not in these numbers, until we reach our goals’ of installing a new unity government.
Blankets, food, medical supplies and electrical generators were being distributed for the sit-in, and after Aoun’s speech white tents were being set up on two streets leading to Siniora’s office as many protesters were expected to dig in for a long haul.
Organisers pledged that the event would be peaceful and Hezbollah deployed thousands of its own ‘discipline men’, who maintained tight crowd control and took up positions between army forces and protesters.
The Lebanese Army had instructions to maintain order and not to take sides in the protest.
Arriving in Beirut on Friday evening for talks with Siniora, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said: ‘The government of Lebanon is a constitutional and an elected government.
‘The attempts to disrupt a constitutional and an elected government in order to topple it through unconstitutional methods is not the right step to take.’
Prime Minister Siniora received a telephone call Friday evening from King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia.
During the telephone conversation, Abdallah informed Siniora of his full support for his political stands, and that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is opposed to all actions that disturb the peace.
Meanwhile, the Socialists’ candidate for the French presidential election, Segolene Royal, called on Friday for overflights of the UN forces’ positions by Israeli aircraft to ‘cease’, during a visit to the headquarters of the force in Naqura, in southern Lebanon.
‘It is true that overflights by Israeli aircraft are putting UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) in a difficult position and undermining its credibility, so I plan to talk to the Israeli leaders about this,’ in Israel on Sunday (3 December), Royal told the press.
‘I believe that these overflights should end because it is in the interest of both Israel and Lebanon. I believe the UN mandate and the UNIFIL mandate should be respected, so the overflights must stop,’ said the French Socialist official, speaking during a visit to the UNIFIL headquarters in Naqura.
According to UNIFIL Chief of Staff French General Philippe Stoltz, these overflights are an ‘almost daily’ occurrence.
Royal, who began a regional tour on Friday, with Beirut, confirmed that she would be going to the Gaza Strip on Sunday to meet Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas.
Royal also called for an international conference on Lebanon.
‘I believe it is vital for an international conference on Lebanon to be organised rapidly,’ adding that, ‘This is a time of crisis.’
She said that ‘you often see on the ground that if political initiatives are not taken to stabilise the situation, economic aid is not effective’.
She stressed: ‘The international community and possible contributors to Lebanese recovery must take action, apply pressure, compel each party to face up to its responsibilities for the Lebanese institutions to run well, and particularly for the court involving an international role to be put in place.’
Royal, urged protagonists in the Lebanese crisis to ‘pick up the thread of dialogue again’.
Time is up,’ she warned. ‘Things can fall apart at any moment.
‘We are facing extremely close deadlines. The situation is in deadlock; dialogue has been broken off. This dialogue must be resumed.’
During a meeting with Royal, Hezbollah member of parliament Ali Ammar said: ‘France has a big role to play if it so wishes and if it marks itself out, as it appears to be doing, from the madness of American policy.
‘We Lebanese are proud of our friendship with France because we are linked by many things’, he added, specifying that ‘Hezbollah resistance (against Israel) takes its inspiration from the French resistance,’ against Nazism.
The Hezbollah MP said that he could not see any end to Lebanon’s problems ‘without a regional settlement’ of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Ammar added that his party did ‘not refuse dialogue’ with other Lebanese parties to put an end to the crisis, while acknowledging that ‘obstacles’ existed.
The Hezbollah MP described his party’s image in the West as ‘unjust’. ‘Hezbollah believes in Lebanese sovereignty. It is not the ally of the supposed Damascus-Tehran axis,’ he said.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, whose political stock rose sharply after the resistance put up by his movement’s fighters to Israel’s devastating July-August offensive, had called for a massive turnout on Friday.
‘We appeal to all Lebanese, from every region and political movement, to take part in a peaceful and civilised demonstration on Friday to rid us of an incapable government that has failed in its mission,’ he said in a television broadcast greeted with shots in the air in parts of the capital.
Siniora also went on television late on Thursday to vow that his cabinet would not be cowed.
‘We will not allow any coup against our democratic regime,’ he added.
Druze leader Walid Jumblatt said: ‘We will stay home, we will hang the Lebanese flags . . . and when they will decide to return to dialogue, we will welcome that.’
Lebanon’s pro- and anti-Syrian factions have reached a dangerous deadlock that threatens to paralyse all state institutions.
Tensions escalated after the street assassination last month of anti-Syrian industry minister Pierre Gemayel.
The key pro-Syrian officials in Lebanon’s power-sharing regime – the president and the parliament speaker – do not recognise the rump anti-Damascus cabinet left after the pullout of six pro-Syrian ministers.
President Lahoud said ahead of Friday’s show of strength that the government is ‘no longer legal’ because it does not adequately represent the country’s religious make-up, and said he was confident of a peaceful march.
‘The resistance (Hezbollah) is not going to shoot Lebanese people, and there will not be a civil war,’ Lahoud said.
